Intel Teraflops design examined

One of Intel's research areas is what they call “Terascale Computing”. This research is really about discovering how to deal with computer architecture in the next decade or so. One element of this research, a project code-named Polaris, is a chip that delivers over a teraflop of performance. The first silicon prototype of this Teraflops chip was presented at ISSCC 2007 by members of the design team.

“Terascale Computing” is an Intel marketing term for research projects that are investigating how to take advantage of future process scaling and exploit greater parallelism. The first few generations of multicore products have been relatively straight forward extensions of conventional thinking. Right now, most MPU vendors are shipping products with 2-4 identical cores. For the next generation integrating 4-8 cores, with more cache, more memory bandwidth and more system functionality seems fairly reasonable. However, beyond that point, architects cannot continue using the same tricks with 16 or 32 cores..